by Jon Land
“Our people must be protected, especially now.”
“Those concrete bunkers I saw were built recently, Rabbi. You expected this, didn’t you?”
“As I told you, the time of His coming is almost upon us. The Americans were killed because they uncovered the ancient scroll foretelling where and when. They may have recorded this on the disc you stole, making that disc the only means we may have left to learn the answers we must learn.”
“And if I can’t get it back?”
“Then you will be of no value to us.”
Ben leaned forward so he could better study the old man’s ever-blank expression. He had grown used to reading people by their eyes, using a person’s gaze as a barometer of his thoughts and intentions. But the dark glasses that covered Mordecai Lev’s sightless eyes made this impossible.
“Are you threatening me, Rabbi?”
“We do not believe the killers found the scroll at the site, Inspector. That can only mean it was too well hidden or already shipped somewhere else for safety. In either case, we would like you to find it for us.”
“You have an entire government at your disposal,” he said, finally.
“Who? The army? Shin Bet? We trust them less than we trust the Palestinians. We are a pain in all their asses. They would like nothing better than to be rid of us and the political problems we cause. If I told you what they had offered for us to give up this settlement ...” He shook his head.
“You turned them down.”
“Because the West Bank belongs to Israel, and so it will belong to Israel again. This is a mere moment in time, a flicker that will fade quickly when the true history is written.”
“A history that doesn’t include the Palestinian people.”
“You can’t change that, Inspector. The Messiah is coming and He is coming here to the West Bank, to the land of Judea and Samaria you may dwell on but never call your own.”
Ben rose and felt instantly light-headed and woozy. “And in spite of that, Rabbi, you picked me to do your work for you.”
“As I said, it is for your own good.”
“But you haven’t told me why.”
“You aren’t ready to hear yet.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It will have to be.”
“You know, you’re right.” Ben stood before Lev on his wobbly legs. “I think I’ll leave now. If you want to have me killed or returned to my Israeli inquisitors, go ahead.”
Lev made no move whatsoever. “Speaking of Israelis . . .”
Ben studied the old man again, trying to penetrate what lay behind those dark glasses. “What, Rabbi?”
“Your friend Chief Inspector Barnea is up for a very important promotion. I assume she has told you.”
“Get to the point.”
“If you help us, we can take steps to assure that this promotion is hers.”
“And if I don’t?”
Lev remained silent, tapping the floor slowly with his cane.
* * * *
CHAPTER 20
I
haven’t been able to reach Dawud,” Ben’s brother said over the phone in a scratchy, weary voice.
Ben had found the message waiting for him upon reaching the Municipal Building in Jericho and had phoned his brother back instantly. Mordecai Lev had Ben driven back to his apartment, where all he wanted to do was collapse in bed. But he couldn’t fall asleep, no matter how hard he tried. By ten o’clock he gave up and drove to police headquarters after taking a hot shower.
“Tell me what was going on in the Judean Desert,” Sayeed Kamal continued finally.
“An archaeological dig. Large scale.”
“Dawud never would have signed on to something like that without telling me.”
“When was the last time you spoke with him directly?”
“Ten days ago.”
“From Brown?”
“Yes.” Then, with desperation lacing his voice, “I don’t know. I can’t be sure. He called me. He said he was in his apartment near the university.”
“Have you been able to reach anyone else at Brown, someone who might have known what he was up to? This adviser of his, perhaps.”
“Not yet. This isn’t like Dawud, not like him at all.”
“Dawud lied to you because he was ordered to. The phone calls, the E-mails, you’ve been receiving—all engineered to assure you had no reason to believe your son was anywhere but where he said he was for the past five months.”
“Why was he killed, Bayan?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ll find out.”
In that instant they were brothers again. Before Ben’s marriage to a woman Sayeed did not approve of. Before his return to the West Bank. An image of them playing baseball together for the first time in Dearborn’s Fordson Park flashed through Ben’s mind.
“Yes, Sayeed,” he said, “I will find out.”
* * * *
Y
ou want me to what?” Captain Fawzi Wallid, the chief of police in Jericho, asked after Ben had finished his proposal. His office always smelled of the flowers adorning his desk in a simple vase, the scents varying by season and his wife’s choice of plantings.
“Assign me to the case of the Americans murdered in the Judean.”
Wallid hedged, fingered one of the pockmarks that dotted his face. “The Israelis have jurisdiction. You are asking me to violate policy, Inspector.”
“Whose policy, Captain? The Israelis assumed jurisdiction on land that is now ours; we did not yield it.”
“All the same, the ramifications of conducting an official inquiry . . .”
“Who said it had to be official? It’s our territory. At the very least we should have a liaison assigned to keep track of the investigation’s progress.”
“And you’re volunteering.”
“I have some free time.”
Captain Wallid gave Ben a long look. “The Palestinian Council delegate in charge of internal security called to compliment our handling of the incident in Baladiya Square yesterday.”
“I’m glad.”
“We turned a negative situation to our advantage.”
“We could do the same thing in this instance, sidi. Imagine if the Palestinian police under your command were able to solve these murders before Israel’s Shin Bet.”
Wallid’s eyebrows flickered. “An interesting prospect indeed, Inspector.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 21
W
hat is the meaning of this?” Moshe Baruch of Shin Bet demanded when he saw Ben enter the zone that had been cordoned off with sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the wind.
“The meaning of this,” Ben said, “is that the Palestinian police has decided this crime took place on our land. While we do not insist on taking over the investigation, we do insist on being made a part of it.”
“And what makes you think I will go along with this?”
“Because you want to avoid a formal complaint being lodged with your government about the kidnapping of a Palestinian police officer last night.”
“And who was this officer?”
“Me.”
“I know nothing about that, Inspector.”
“As I’m sure the official investigation into the matter would reveal.”
Before Baruch could respond, his eyes widened and peered over Ben’s shoulder. Ben turned and saw Danielle Barnea entering the scene just as he had, looking as surprised to see him as he was to see her.
“I should have known you would be involved in this together,” Baruch hissed. “Beware, Pakad. Your Palestinian friend’s presence here represents bad judgment; yours represents severe insubordination.”
“Parkad Barnea is here at my request to act as liaison,” Ben told Baruch, still looking at her. “I’m sure you understand the rationale, since unlike our Security Service, the Palestinian police maintains no official relations with Shin Bet.”
“You should listen to him,” Danielle added. “I don’t think you want the kind of mess a formal jurisdictional dispute might lead to.”
“You have enough problems already, Commander,” said Ben.
Baruch rotated his simmering gaze between them, fixing ultimately on Ben. “So what do you want?”
“To inspect the crime scene, for starters.”
“You already made use of that opportunity yesterday.”
Ben turned toward the cave opening, still guarded by a pair of Israeli soldiers. “You interrupted us before we’d finished.”
* * * *
T
hank you,” Danielle said softly as they walked toward the goat path with two more Israeli soldiers clinging to their shadows.
“Just like old times, eh, Pakad?” Ben tried to joke.
Danielle managed a smile. “All too much so, it seems. What happened to your nose?”
“Baruch’s men last night—men and one woman, that is.”
“Woman?”
“With a scar down her cheek,” Ben said, drawing a line down the left side of his face.
Danielle nodded. “Shoshanna Tavi.”
“Know her?”
“We were in the Sayaret together.”
“Apparently, she learned her trade as well as you.”
“Even better,” Danielle said, tilting her head back toward Baruch. “She’s his mistress.”
* * * *
T
he triangular entrance to the cave was just over six feet high. Rocks and stones had been piled on either side.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Danielle said as they climbed the steps of the goat path.
”You were considerate enough to inform me about my nephew. That was all I had a right to expect.”
“From a colleague.”
”Yes.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more than that for you yesterday.”
“What about the last three weeks?”
Danielle hesitated. “We need to discuss that. Tomorrow night.”
“At my house?”
“No, mine. I’ll cook dinner.”
Ben took this as a hopeful sign. She had cooked dinner for him only once before, and it had been one of the high points of their relationship. Ben remembered feeling comfortable crossing into Israel for the first time. Even the border guards seemed to have a different attitude toward him.
Danielle had served pressed chickpeas with garlic and olive oil called humus, along with pita bread and olives to start. The main course was kibbee, a Mid-eastern dish of ground lamb and pine nuts his mother used to make, and grape leaves stuffed with rice and beef. For dessert they had fresh fruit and honey cake.
What Ben recalled most about that night, though, was not the meal so much as the smells that filled Danielle’s spacious Jerusalem apartment. Warm and spicy smells of food cooking on the stove and in the oven that lingered in the air well after the meal was done. Scents that left a lump in Ben’s throat because they defined what home was all about and what his had not smelled like in a very long time. It was the kind of thing you got used to living without until something made you realize how much you missed it. That night Ben left Danielle’s fully believing their life together had a chance to succeed. He supposed he should have felt happy about the change of heart from her recent behavior Danielle’s repeat invitation might have indicated. But the somber look in her eyes quickly tempered his optimism.
“How could a cave like this go uncharted for so long?” Danielle asked before he could take his thoughts any further.
Ben looked at the rocks and stones stacked before either side of the six-foot-high entrance. “Judging from those piles, my guess would be that the cave had probably been sealed by a rock slide decades, even centuries ago. This team must have come equipped with the kind of magnetic resonance devices capable of detecting an opening beyond.”
“They cleared it themselves.”
“One stone at a time, by the look. Tedious work, but necessary to ensure none of the contents inside would be disturbed.” Ben tried to picture his nephew participating in the painstaking task and could bring to mind only the inquisitive, smiling boy he had last seen more than five years before. The beard and close-cropped hair on Dawud’s college ID photo made him look so much older, not a boy anymore.
Danielle gazed back at Ben as they neared the entrance. “People lived in caves like this for refuge during several of our ancient wars.”
“I didn’t know you were such an expert, Pakad.”
“On war, or seeking refuge, Inspector?”
“Take your pick.”
On Baruch’s orders, the soldiers standing guard stood aside to let them pass through the entrance. Once inside Ben and Danielle switched on the flashlights they had brought with them, a good thing since the light saved them a costly misstep onto the cave floor’s steep downward grade. Ben considered the sad likelihood they had just retraced steps made by his nephew dozens of times, perhaps tied to the reason for his and the others’ murders.
The cave consisted of two primary chambers with a total length of thirty feet and width of just under eight. A gap in the far wall indicated a trail, dangerous and steep, that led into the deep underground recesses of the underlying structure of the rugged hillside.
Closer to the front, several trenches had been cut through the thick debris that covered the cave floor, going down three feet in some places and two in others. Clearly the archaeologists had found evidence of human habitation in the form of ashes, burnt logs, and the remains of what looked like some kind of porous material that had once been ropes or mats.
“They just left their finds like this?” Danielle asked, feeling chilled by the cave’s surprisingly cool temperatures, a sharp contrast to the heat building outside. A musty smell clung to the air.
“This doesn’t qualify as much, nothing substantial and maybe not even worth preserving. But they probably reached the level where most of this was found only four or five days ago, would have picked up where they left off yesterday.”
“And what about this?” Danielle asked, and aimed her beam at a much shallower and smaller depression in the cave floor just beyond the larger trenches.
Ben knelt down and used the length of his arms for crude measurement. The depression was barely a foot deep and two feet square.
“Judging from the smoothed edges, I’d say they pulled something out of this,” Danielle said, leaning over Ben’s shoulder.
Ben ran his hand along the outline of the depression. “But it doesn’t fit with the rest of these artifacts.”
“How can you tell?”
“Well, everything else they uncovered dates back to the first few centuries a.d. Something found this shallow would date back a century at most and probably considerably less than that. From an archaeological standpoint, it would be worthless.”
“But whatever it was, they dug it out.”
“Clearly.”
“Then let’s see if we can find where they put it.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 22
T
he archaeological team had placed their finds in airtight metal and plastic cases that were then stored in the luggage compartment of one of the three Land Rovers. The vehicles themselves looked to be decades old, untouched by rust thanks to their aluminum bodies but covered in dings and pockmarks. Baruch assigned a trio of soldiers to shadow Ben’s and Danielle’s every move, the commander himself remaining at a distance discreet enough to appear disinterested while always being able to keep his eye on them as well.
Each case had been neatly catalogued with finds made at different junctures of the five-month expedition. Ben and Danielle started with the case reserved for finds made in this location, labeled “Area 6.” Ben unlatched the lid and raised it.
“Like you said,” Danielle recalled, sliding up alongside him, “nothing of value.”
They stared together at a layer of rocks that had been packed into the case. Daniell
e reached in and took one in her hand, testing its weight.
